This is the end (of Hackerspace week)
It was a week of laughter, of tears; a moment in time of great hopes and sorrows. Yes friends, it was Irish Hackerspace Week, a week of celebration and promotion for all of the Irish hackerspaces: Galway’s 091 Labs, Dublin’s TOG, Belfast’s HackNI, Limerick’s Hackerspace, and Hackerspace Cork.
At the end of the week? It was a success. 091 Labs hosted some very popular events; 091 Labs hosted some very unpopular events too. There were some hard lessons learned in the importance of groundwork, communication and coordination during Friday night’s Synchronous Hackerspace Quiz. There were some even harder lessons in promotion and scheduling to be learned from Saturday’s Poetry Smackdown and Sunday’s PC Repair Day. The Poetry Smackdown unintentionally clashed with a similar event elsewhere in Galway City, the quiz fell afoul of open source technology and today’s repair day suffered from an uncomfortable proximity with Sunday morning.
Incidentally: The Synchronous Hackerspace Quiz? We won – 091 Labs won. Our victory was impulsively declared in a moment of grandiose self-acclamation because of a complete breakdown in communications with the other involved Hackerspaces. We were left in a queasy limbo, adrift in time and space and unable to determine if indeed another hackerspace scored more correct answers than us. A hasty quorum was met in which it was decided to bless our article of self-held belief, a theorem that simply reads “why yes, TOG got pwnd,” as an official 091 Labs doctrine.
We won, hoo-hah!
So far I’ve talked about failures, but we had out great successes: Gerry Kavanagh’s Asterisk VOIP PBX setup demonstration, Joe Desbonnet’s household hacking, yesterday’s Art After Noon (Katie, Vivian, etc. – please contact me so I can correctly give credit) and solar powered-robots workshop by David McKeown all brought the boys to the yard the public in the door. I’ve personally come away educated. 091 Labs has come away the wiser and with several new members (shout-out!). TOG has presumably come away pwnd in the aftermath of the quiz.
To all of the organizers of the various events: Thank you! You were the women and men who made Irish Hackerspaces Week a reality at 091 Labs.
To all of the attendees: Thank you! Come again.
